from the dmca-abuse dept

We've talked a lot about how copyright law and the DMCA can be abused to take down legitimate, non-infringing content, interfering with one's free speech rights. And we're always brushed off by copyright maximalists, who insist that any complaints about taking down legitimate speech are overblown.

So isn't it interesting that we've just discovered that our own key anti-SOPA blog post and discussion... have been blocked thanks to a bogus DMCA takedown?

Last November, in the heat of the SOPA fight, I wrote a blog post, where I tried to pull together a bunch of the different reasons why SOPA and PIPA were really bad ideas. It was a very popular post for us, and I heard directly from many people that it was quite helpful in getting them to understand the real problems of these two bills.

Well, as I just discovered, that post cannot be found directly via Google any more.

I actually discovered this entirely by accident. I was looking for a totally different old Techdirt post, and was scrolling through Google results, when I saw a note at the bottom of the Google page saying that results had been removed due to a DMCA takedown:

You see that warning every so often, and I have to admit that I came really close to just ignoring it. But then I remembered that the search I was doing was using the site:techdirt.com parameter, so any such notice must mean that a Techdirt page had been blocked by a DMCA takedown. That seemed surprising. So I clicked through and found this DMCA takedown notice -- and there at entry 253 is the URL for our post. The takedown comes from a company named Armovore, who apparently is one of those "anti-piracy" firms that sends DMCA notices out on behalf of others. In this case, it sent out the DMCA notice on behalf of Paper Street Cash -- which is a porn company I've never heard of prior to this. They're claiming that the takedown is about content from a site called TeamSkeet.

If you're scratching your head, you're not the only one. There's clearly nothing infringing in our post. I just wasted too much time going through all 300+ comments on that post and I don't see anything that includes any porn or even links to any porn as far as I can tell. Instead, it seems that Armovore and Paper Street Cash sent a clearly bogus DMCA takedown notice, which served the purpose of censoring our key blog post in the SOPA fight. And they did it on January 20th... the day that SOPA was officially shelved.

There are some other oddities in that list as well, including TorrentFreak's article about how ICE took down 84,000 websites illegally by seizing the mooo.com domain and saying that all 84,000 of those sites were involved in child porn.

In other words, two separate articles that have been key to the discussion concerning abuses of copyright law... both taken out of Google's index due to a bogus DMCA takedown. Hmm....

While many of the other links do appear to go to sites that may offer up infringing content, just looking at the URLs alone make you wonder what most of them have to do with Paper Street Cash or TeamSkeet. Some of the links talk about top Christian albums. One is to some Dave Matthews songs. Another is to Wiz Khalifa music. There's another one that appears to be a link to downloads of the TV show Prison Break. Obviously those things may be infringing, but the notice itself only talks about TeamSkeet, and if Armovore doesn't represent those other artists, it may have broken the law in pretending to.

Then there's a really bizarre one. Entry 533 on the list is... TeamSkeet's own website. I don't know how much Armovore charges Paper Street Cash, but they deserve a refund.

Most importantly, though, our page clearly is not infringing. This is a 100% bogus DMCA takedown -- something we only discovered by complete accident over a month later -- hiding one of our key articles in an important fight about abusing copyright law to take down free speech. Seems like a perfect example of how copyright can be -- and is -- abused to suppress free speech.

In the meantime, we'll be exploring our options for responding to this obviously bogus takedown from both Armovore and Paper Street Cash.

Update: After "further review," Google has reinstated our story to its index....

from the cwf+rtb dept

Before getting into the "meat" of this post about how our CwF+RtB experiment worked out, I want to announce that we've "replenished" the store with some new t-shirts and hoodies. These are brand new -- not the same t-shirts and hoodies we had before, which are sold out. You have a choice of either a t-shirt or a hoodie with the full Techdirt logo, or my personal favorite DMCA takedown t-shirt which says on the front:

The content of this t-shirt has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice.

Consider the message on the shirt a good way to engage people in a conversation about the abuses of copyright law and the DMCA. The hoodies come with a copy of my Approaching Infinity book, while you can get the t-shirts without the book or with the book.

Also, we are doing one thing differently this time around. Rather than just waiting until we sell out to stop selling these shirts, we're taking open orders for two weeks only and then will make the shirts and send them out. So if you want this shirt from us, you have two weeks to order. And that's it. On to the post itself...

After seeing many musicians setting up various interesting/amusing "tiers" of scarce value worth buying, while also working to connect with fans, we decided to launch our own CwF+RtB tiers, at the end of July, as an experiment to see what we might learn. We knew that this sort of thing worked for music, but had no idea if it would work elsewhere -- say, for a blog. It wasn't designed to replace our existing business model, but just as an experiment to see what would happen -- and what we could learn that might help others implementing similar business models.

I should apologize, as this post detailing the results is way, way, way overdue. We had most of the results and lessons within about a month, but this is a big post to write up and I kept procrastinating. No good reason why: there was just always something going on in the news that seemed more urgent and every so often I do like to catch up on sleep.

The quick summary: we consider the experiment to have been a huge success.

We brought in approximately $37,000 total due to this experiment, mostly in the course of that first month.

Nearly $12,000 came from direct sales to individuals of the tiers between $5 and $150.

As was revealed in an article at Wired, another $5,000 came from an individual, Didier Mary, who was working on a business plan and bought the Techdirt Reviews Your Business Plan package. The package included an Insight Community conversation, which recently concluded, about his business model idea. Didier has told us that "it was a great experience" and very useful to him in moving forward with his plans.

Another $20,000 came from larger companies, which purchased Insight Community packages after learning about them through this effort.

The effort also resulted in potential future deals, as it led many more companies to contact us to learn more about the Insight Community.

Other companies, with whom we were already talking about the Insight Community, contacted us after we launched this, with one noting that if what his company had been discussing with us was on the list, he probably would have just "clicked buy" right away (though, with that company, we're still discussing a deal and have not yet completed it).

Ignoring the higher end Insight Community deals, the average amount paid by users was over $70. This was significantly higher than expected.

Sales came from 15 different countries around the globe. North America and Europe were obviously the biggest, but we also got sales from Asia, South America and Australia (no Africa). The international sales might have been bigger if we had launched international sales the same day we launched the overall effort. Unfortunately, we didn't have all the details on that sorted out until a week later, and I think we probably lost some international sales that way. The US Postal Service does make international sales much easier these days -- especially with its "one rate" boxes, but shipping is still really expensive, and many countries then add annoying tariffs on top of everything. This was annoying, but (unfortunately) unavoidable.

Our highest selling item was not the cheapest, second cheapest or third cheapest offering (contrary to the claims that people just want the cheapest item). Instead, the biggest seller -- by a pretty wide margin -- was the Approaching Infinity package, that included both a copy of my book and a t-shirt.

For quite a while, the hoodies (which we almost didn't offer) outsold the t-shirts... but in the end the t-shirts barely passed the hoodies.

No one bought the Day with Techdirt package, though we actually got a lot of inquiries about that, with multiple people who don't live in California saying that if they were closer, they would have bought it. This is still available, though.

And, fear not, no one bought the $100 Million Silence Techdirt offer (still available as well!), though we did get a few people who were worried that someone would actually take us up on this -- and one satirical offer from someone claiming to be from the RIAA, which made me laugh, saying the RIAA would pay up, but wanted to guarantee "exclusive rights" to the RIAA, such that it would be able to "pursue appropriate legal action against any and all 3rd parties that make use of this silence purposely or inadvertently" including, of course "the right to pursue similar action against any individuals who are also not reading Techdirt and therefore infringing on our own licensed agreement to be the sole recipient of a Techdirt-free world." Brilliant.

However, the $100 Million Silence Techdirt offer did get the most traffic of any of the tiers, by a factor of three -- though, it also drove many people to check out the other tiers.

Lessons Learned

So, what did we learn? Lots of things:

This works! These sorts of models can absolutely work in connecting with fans and in making money.

All of you, in our community, are awesome. Not just for buying, obviously, but because the overall response we got was incredible. This included many really, really nice emails that made us feel great, along with happy emails and Twitter messages from people receiving their packages, and telling us stories about wearing the clothes, reading the books, etc.

It's fun making people happy. Really. It really gave all of us here at Floor64 a great feeling every time we heard back from happy community members.

Logistics and inventory management are more complicated than you expect. We sort of knew this ahead of time, but you realize it first-hand when somehow, somewhere copies of signed books go missing, and you suddenly need to ask for an author to send extras. Also, dealing with sourcing inventory from so many different people for the Book and Music club is doable, but takes a lot of time to manage. Though, I have to say, every one we worked with -- from authors and musicians to publishers, agents and record labels really were fantastic. We didn't have even the slightest trouble from any of our partners in this endeavor. Shipping out the products definitely was an effort, but we tried to make it fun, with a group of us working together to package up and ship stuff (and on this one, the team here, lead by Gretchen, did a fantastic job, going above and beyond to get everything organized and shipped).

Having lots of options was a good thing because we weren't very accurate in predicting what would sell. We came close to not offering the hoodies at all, but those were incredibly popular.

You can't keep everybody happy, but you should try! We had to set up a better process for "customer support" as we launched this (nice job, Dennis!) and then work with and respond to customers who had questions or (in a few cases) problems. A few times the problem was that we did not explain things clearly enough, and sometimes there were problems with shipments (or, in one case, a hoodie that was frayed). But we tried our best to make sure everyone was happy and hopefully succeeded (mostly).

What you're selling should match your audience. The Book Club sold really well. The Music Club, not as much -- despite being awesome (seriously, the combined Music Club items are really, really cool, and the music is great as well). But, in retrospect perhaps that made sense, as the books in the Book Club directly related to everything we talk about here. The Music Club, while supporting artists who did things that we talked about here, was a bit different, and required people to like the music as well, which is a lot more subjective. Bundling together four separate musicians with different styles was, perhaps, not a great idea. On top of that, we perhaps did not do enough to promote the music itself to get more people to enjoy the work of those musicians. Finally, while some of the offerings were "unique," others could be purchased elsewhere, which limited the "scarcity" of the overall package.

Some promotions worked really well. The first promotion we did was offering anyone who bought both the music and book clubs together a choice of either lunch with me or a free hoodie. This helped motivate a bunch of folks to step up and buy -- and resulted in a handful of lunches.

Having lunch with people was really, really cool. I have to admit that I was a bit nervous going into the lunches from the above promotion, but they were all really amazing, often in very different ways. Each individual was really interesting and the conversations were quite engaging and thought provoking and fun. I'm pretty sure every lunch ended up lasting well over the allotted hour. I ended up learning a lot and had a great time at every one. I'm hoping to set up more ways to do things like that, if not the same thing.

Even the tiers that didn't sell, still generated interest in other things we were doing. A bunch of people contacted us about the Day With Techdirt package, and while no one bought it, many of them bought other packages instead.

Not everyone who says they will buy will buy, but that's okay. It was interesting to note that some people who told us they would buy (or even announced it on their Twitter/Facebook feeds) never actually did buy for whatever reason. That's fine, of course. Everyone is free to do what they want, but it was interesting to note. Just because someone says they'll buy, it doesn't mean they will.

Communicating directly with everyone can be difficult. While others here handled customer service requests, I started getting a bunch of emails personally from people who participated, sometimes with long and detailed questions. I tried to reply to most of these, but it was difficult, and I'm sure I missed a few.

Anyway, that's the basic summary. This really has been a lot of fun and quite educational at the same time. We've still got lots of things planned and will be trying a few new things as well, but thanks to everyone who participated and a big thanks to all the authors and musicians who partnered with us, along with the team here at Floor64 for helping to make this all work.

from the well,-that-was-fun dept

As mentioned over the weekend, we were briefly hacked on Saturday evening. We've put in a bit of time to figure out what happened, clean up the mess and correct the problems (and harden some other defenses as well). The short story is that we left open a big hole that we shouldn't have left open. Yay. We had certainly locked down most of the obvious holes, and people try to hack us on a semi-regular basis, with little success. But, if someone's persistent enough, they'll find a way. In this case, though, we made it a hell of a lot easier than we should have. This particular hacker tried hitting a whole bunch of different routes early Saturday morning, most of which got rejected (some people noticed his attempt to do a SQL injection via the comments -- that failed). However, he went on to try SQL injections just about everywhere and eventually found one where we hadn't properly escaped things, and bam, that's all it takes. As you probably know, this site has been around since 1998, and while we've dumped/updated most of the old code, and most of the new code is properly secured, there were still a little pieces left over from the ancient code -- and that's where the big vulnerabilities were. That's not an excuse. We should have caught it earlier (in fact, we actually had been testing some code to replace some of the vulnerabilities, but hadn't deployed it yet -- but, we now realize it wouldn't have blocked all the problems). But, it is what happened.

From there, the hacker got into part of the blog admin (don't want to get into too many details of how the blog backend works, but it actually involves two separate admins -- which are separate from other stuff we do). Then, he basically had pretty good access to doing some stuff (though not everything) on the blog. He poked around a bit, deleted a bunch of comments, deleted a whole ton of old story submissions (most of which were junk anyway -- so thanks!) and then replaced a few stories on the front page with his fancy "hacked!" claims.

After that, the story is pretty straightforward. Once we realized what happened, we put the old stories back in place and made sure to quickly toss up some more secure walls to keep him out of the admin. We also shut down comments and submissions for a while, even though we were pretty damn sure the vulnerability wasn't there (it wasn't), but we wanted to make sure. Then a few of us spent some time digging around to understand just what the guy did so we could retrace his steps and make sure we killed off the basic vulnerabilities. Considering that he tried to hit us from a bunch of different angles, this took a bit longer than expected. But, once we figured out the basics, it was just a matter of tracking down the actual holes in the code. It was a little frustrating, since we really thought we'd blocked out SQL injections -- but in the end, it turns out we didn't do it absolutely everywhere. Anyway, there's a fair amount of code to go through, so we've been going over it with a fine-tooth comb, and checking it twice, then locking it down again.

Finally, we've been restoring the lost comments (we're doing that right now, so they might not all be back yet), of which we believe we didn't lose any (there's a small chance that a very very small number of comments were lost). Restoring the lost submissions is a bit much at this point (as I said, most were junk anyway), so if you submitted stories late Friday or Saturday, and really think we should see them, perhaps submit them again.

On the whole, there's not that much to say, other than check your code carefully, folks. If there's a hole somewhere, eventually someone's gonna find it. Luckily, this guy didn't do much damage -- just a bit of vandalism -- and he kept a few of us from enjoying what had otherwise been quite nice weekends with our friends and families. But he got us to go over our code pretty carefully (and mentally kick ourselves a few times), and get in touch with our inner CSI detectives to track down exactly what happened.

Update: Well, that was just great. Less than half an hour after posting this, our network provider went down for nearly two hours, despite supposedly having all sorts of redundancies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the hack, but was a bigger issue for the provider. However, it did slow down us restoring the comments, meaning that comments need to remain off for probably another few hours. This has really been a fun weekend.

Update 2: Comments are back. We did end up losing a few comments, mostly those right before the hack. Really sorry about that. If you said something really important and it's missing... say it again, please.

As you know, we've been running our CwF+RtB experiment for a few weeks now. We're looking to do new promotions and special "this week only" types of offerings, on a regular basis. Two weeks ago, the special offer was a free Techdirt hoodie or free lunch with Mike Masnick, with the purchase of both the Book Club and the Music Club packages. This past week, we tried separating out just Amanda Palmer's signed book and CD for those who didn't want the entire Music Club. We've got plenty of ideas for other promotions, but we thought, why not get some ideas from you? And we'll do it as an Insight Community case, as well, to demonstrate again how the Insight Community works. So, the way this will work is that you get to suggest ideas for promotions within CwF+RtB (or potentially new tiers that go beyond the 1 week promotion), and if we use your idea (this only applies to the first person to suggest that particular idea), you'll get a free Approaching Infinity package, with the book signed by Mike (that doesn't come with the regular package). So, you'd get Mike's signed book plus a free t-shirt. We look forward to your ideas!

from the a-little-experiment dept

Time for a little experimenting from Techdirt... For years, we've been talking about various new business models in the digital era, and how they can work. More recently, we've seen a rapid increase in musicians who have figured this out (though, we're seeing it in a few other industries as well). Back in January, for a presentation that I did at the music industry event MidemNet about Trent Reznor's various experiments, I tried to simplify what he had done into a simple equation, and came up with

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

That simple formula has resonated incredibly well, to the point that I'm receiving emails daily about it specifically -- and not just in the music industry, but many other industries, asking how they can apply it themselves. Some complained that such a model only worked for "big" name acts like Reznor, so I later expanded the original presentation to include many other acts of varying levels of fame and success to show how it could work at many different levels. Most recently, I used those examples to show where I believed the overall music industry was heading.

But, it actually goes beyond just the music industry. In fact, I'd argue that these models apply to many different industries, including the media business. After doing all those presentations, some of us here at Floor64/Techdirt got to talking about ways that they could be applied to other industries -- and one thing led to another where we began to wonder why we didn't test them out ourselves. So, we looked at the various models and thought about what could we do along those lines. I certainly love the "tiered" models, where there are numerous options of increasing value that people can buy into, and we figured, why not test that out ourselves? It would be a fun experiment and a great learning experience. So... here we are introducing:

We had a lot of fun putting this together. There's quite a range of things on the list. Of course, everything you are used to here on Techdirt remains as free and open as ever. Then there are all sorts of relatively inexpensive extras you can buy, granting you some extra abilities, like the chance to see some Techdirt posts before everyone else, followed up by some fun products -- such as t-shirts and a package that includes both a t-shirt and a book written by me. Like hoodies? We've got those too.

Beyond that, however, is where we really started to explore the possibilities. We realized we also wanted to use it to help promote others who understood this vision (it's not just about us, of course). So we put together two great offerings that I'm incredibly excited about. The first is our Techdirt Music Club offering, that doesn't just promote four musicians (Jill Sobule, Amanda Palmer, Moto Boy and Joe Pug) -- all of whom we've discussed at times for the cool things they do with new business models -- but also offers you something unique that you can't get anywhere else. All four (and their management) have been a tremendous joy to work with through this process. It's great brainstorming with creative, positive people.

Next is the Techdirt Book Club, which is a fantastic collection of must read books from a bunch of authors whose thinking on this is far beyond what else you might find out there. Even better? All of the authors involved -- William Patry, James Boyle, David Levine, Michele Boldrin and Michael Heller -- are so enthusiastic about this experiment that they've agreed to provide signed copies of the books in question. It's the ultimate signed book collection -- and, as a bonus we throw in additional features for Techdirt and the book that we put together from my writings -- which I'll sign as well.

From there we've also got a chance to hang out -- and spend the day with us and some friends. See the magic that is writing a Techdirt post and (much more exciting) have some entertaining discussions myself and with much more interesting folks like Mark Fletcher, Andy Kessler, Rich Skrenta and Eric Goldman. We'll have some meals, we'll hang out at the office, and we'll go out and have some fun as well. Should be a blast.

Above that level, we have a whole series of options that are more for the corporate level -- though, if you're feeling flush, individuals are more than welcome to take part, utilizing the business side of what we do here at Floor64/Techdirt. You've got a variety of different options that include some opportunities to use the Insight Community to get some smart analysis on your business model. Or you can help pick a theme for a week on Techdirt, complete with an Insight Community case and additional posts. There are also offerings where I'll speak at your company or event... all the way up to a full on Techdirt Greenhouse production for your company, both of which include cases with the Insight Community. And, if you really want to dig in, and get every single thing that we have offered... that's available as well.

And, of course, these offerings are targeted at the folks who like what we do, enjoy it and would like to interact with us some more... but we like to offer up things for everyone, including those who aren't huge fans, and would rather we shut up and go away. We've even got a package for you! Though, I warn you, it's a bit pricey. We may be offering something for you, but we never said we'd make it easy for you.

Anyway, we hope you have some fun checking these out -- and find something worthwhile to you. We enjoyed getting the whole thing together, and we're curious to see what we learn from this experiment. Special thanks to the team at Floor64 for putting in some crazy hours before this launch, and to everyone else (authors and their publishers, musicians and their managers, entrepreneurs, etc.) who agreed to take part in this experiment.

Then, of course, the community's been doing some great work diving into all the various details of digital nomads for the crowdsourced whitepaper about digital nomads, sponsored by Dell. The community has already generated nearly one hundred different insightful thoughts on how the rise of digital nomads impacts everything from business decisions, workplace environments and IT decisions. From all that great content, a fantastic digital nomads wiki has been created, and some of the best output from that wiki has been turned into a downloadable whitepaper (pdf) if you're looking to understand things like how to determine the ROI on digital nomads in your business.

And, of course, there have been a variety of ongoing Insight Community insights showing up on American Express's Open Forum blog (including a post I did on what small businesses can learn from Tabasco sauce). There's plenty more going on in the Insight Community as well, we've got a bunch more lined up and coming soon, so if you're not already a member, why not?

from the brief-programming-note dept

As we continue to evolve and grow our business, we've been looking to hire an experienced sales exec to focus on selling the Insight Community. We've been interviewing a variety of candidates, but wanted to alert the wider Techdirt community, as we know that readers here are most likely to understand what we're trying to achieve. If you're an experienced sales exec and believe in what we're doing here, feel free to contact us. Alternatively, if you know of any good candidates, please feel free to send them the job description.

from the pardon-our-dust dept

We've got a bunch of announcements today (and a few more coming up as well), but I wanted to start off with the big one: Techdirt, the company, is becoming Floor64, the company -- while Techdirt, the blog, will remain Techdirt. The blog began back in 1997 as a fun side project by me. Over the years it grew into much more, and in 2000 it became a business, also called Techdirt. In 2006, we launched the Techdirt Insight Community as our main line of business and the natural evolution of what we'd been doing as a company. However, there was growing confusion over the Techdirt brand, as people weren't clear whether it meant the blog, the company or the community -- so we felt it was time to clarify. Specifically, there are now three brands related to this site:

Floor64 becomes our new parent brand. That's the brand under which all of our products will now reside. It's a brand we've used for years internally (though some have noticed), and now it represents our overall outward brand.

Insight Community is one of Floor64's two main offerings. This rebranding of the Techdirt Insight Community will allow us to expand beyond the community we've built around Techdirt, to cover much more than just technology and business. The Insight Community is totally redesigned to reflect where the business has been headed over the past few months. If you're already a member, go check out the totally redesigned system. If you're not yet a member, go sign up and start participating (and earning money). If you're interested in sponsoring a case there, go check out how it works and learn about the value of sponsoring a case and engaging with the community.

The Insight Community is all about generating insights for companies, recognizing, as we often talk about here on Techdirt, that there's value in the creation of insightful content. The Insight Community is a platform that makes it possible for companies to generate insightful expertise on demand for use in a variety of different ways.

Techdirt is our other main offering, and is now solely focused on the blog itself. This should help us avoid some confusion over our different properties and the services that we, as Floor64, offer. Techdirt will remain the same great blog it's been all along, but we'll have some cool new features which we'll be posting about shortly as well. As always, Techdirt, the blog will be focused on providing timely and insightful analysis of technology and business news, with a focus on how technology relates to innovation, public policy and economics.

We've been hard at work on this effort, and there's a lot more to come -- some of which we'll announce today, and much more will be coming in the near future. All of our efforts are, of course, made possible by the great, vibrant, often brilliant and always opinionated community that was built up through this site. So, we're excited to open this new chapter of the business and the site, as we look forward to doing plenty more in the future to continue to give back to this community.

from the be-smart,-make-money dept

It's been a little while since we last updated you on the Techdirt Insight Community, but there's plenty happening there that you're missing out on, if you're not a member. First, we've put together a site, sponsored by Dell, on The Future of Storage, which is powered by the Techdirt Insight Community. We're building an ongoing conversation around the future direction of the storage market. You can join in the conversation itself just by heading straight to the site and commenting on the posts, but if you have experience with storage area network technology, you should join the community itself and submit your insight on where you think the market is heading. The best insights not only get published to the site, but can earn you quite a bit of money. Basically, you can be smart, earn a bunch of money and get recognition for being smart all in one shot. Tough to beat that.

In the meantime, if storage isn't your thing, there are some other open cases within the Insight Community that may interest you, including ones on helping a major beverage company provide online value to its retail partners, the market for accounting software and a look at what Sales 2.0 might really mean. All Techdirt Insight Community cases work on the same basic premise: be really smart, write up your insights and earn money and reputation. We've got lots more coming from the Insight Community in the next few months, but there's no reason to wait. Join now, be smart and earn some money.